… Continues.
See Quine + Boxer in this journal.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
History: The Nightmare Continues
From the AP "Today in History" column for April 12—
On this date:
In 1606, England's King James I decreed the design of the original Union Flag, which combined the flags of England and Scotland.
The 1606 Union Flag incorporated the crosses of St. George (England) and St. Andrew (Scotland).
This suggests some notes on graphic design.
See The Double Cross.
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Sunday, October 28, 2018
Monday, October 15, 2018
History at Bellevue
The previous post, "Tesserae for a Tesseract," contains the following
passage from a 1987 review of a book about Finnegans Wake —
"Basically, Mr. Bishop sees the text from above
and as a whole — less as a sequential story than
as a box of pied type or tesserae for a mosaic,
materials for a pattern to be made."
A set of 16 of the Wechsler cubes below are tesserae that
may be used to make patterns in the Galois tesseract.
Another Bellevue story —
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Joyce’s Nightmare…
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Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Nightmare
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Saturday, August 18, 2012
Nightmare Alley
"History instructs. History also has
a very dark sense of humor.
Irish history, especially."
— John Kelly in The Daily Beast this morning
See also Joyce's Nightmare and
Nightmare Alley in this journal.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Joyce’s Nightmare
For a black widow —
See history in today's Boston.com
and Waldorf in this journal.
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Tuesday, February 8, 2022
In memory of Nick Tosches
For your consideration: "Nightmare Alley" Oscar nominations —
Costume design, production design, cinematography, Best Picture.
See as well the introduction by Nick Tosches to the novel .
A touch I personally like: Over the end credits, Hoagy Carmichael's
"Stardust" plays. From related remarks (here abridged) by poet
David Lehman on November 22, 2015 (the feast of St. Cecilia) —
"Every year on this day I think unfailingly of three things:
— that today is Hoagy Carnichael's birthday ….
— that if time were elastic I would write a series of
popular history novels ….
— that paranoid conspiracy theories … are based on
our fundamental inability to understand events.
From this journal on November 22, 2015 —
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Friday, December 17, 2021
Group Actions
The above title might describe the long damned nightmare
that is the history of the human species, or — a usage I prefer —
a concept from pure mathematics. For an example of the latter,
see posts tagged Octad Group and the URL http://octad.group.
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Monday, February 8, 2021
Folklore
Wendy Derleth
|
https://moviedatabase.fandom.com/ wiki/Wendy_Derleth —
Wendy Derleth is a fictional teacher and a supporting character featured in the Wishmaster film series. Played by actress Jenny O'Hara, she appeared in the first installment of the series, Wishmaster in 1997. Biography Wendy Derleth was a professor of folklore at a university in California. Occasionally, she was called upon to lend her expertise to projects going on with the drama department, but admitted that such a thing was not really in her wheelhouse. In 1997, a woman named Alexandra Amberson came to Professor Derleth for advice under the recommendation of art collector Raymond Beaumont. Derleth had history with Beaumont and saw Amberson's apparent disinterest in the man as a sign of good judgment. Alex had been suffering from recent nightmares and prophetic visions relating to the presence of a Djinn. Without revealing too much, she picked Derleth's brain about the true nature of such creatures. Wendy was quite knowledgeable about Djinn and was quick to point out that these creatures were not cute and funny as one would expect from the likes of Barbara Eden or Robin Williams. They were dangerous and ruthless monsters born from the shadows cast by the first light of creation. |
Related material —
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Sunday, January 31, 2021
Prelude to Groundhog Day
Welcome to Westview continues.
My Windows lockscreen this morning features a badger
emerging from his den. Microsoft’s commentary —
Related commentary from Bellevue —
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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Saturday, September 7, 2013
Structure and Character
(Continued from May 4, 2013)
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"
"It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell."
— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today's previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.
Backstory— Recall, from history's nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second London Blitz.
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Saturday, November 17, 2012
Hey RAM*
Last evening's NY Lottery numbers
985 and 3274, interpreted as the
numbers of Log24 posts, suggest
a look at Joyce's nightmare— history.
* The title refers both to a film and to
a Log24 post, Random Access Memory.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Ambiguation
A new Wikipedia page was created on Oct. 9—
"This page was last modified on 9 October 2012 at 19:54."
This, and a long-running musical, suggest…
"Try to remember the kind of September…"
LIFE Magazine for September 6, 1954, provides
one view of the kind of September when I was
twelve years old. (Also that September, Mitt Romney
was seven. President Obama was born later.)
Top of Life Magazine cover, September 6, 1954
This suggests James Joyce's nightmare view of history.
For some other views of 1954, see selected posts in this journal
that mention that year.
See also IMDb on Grace Kelly that year, and a related theological
reflection from Holy Cross Day, 2002.
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Ariadne and the Exorcist
The title describes two philosophical events (one major, one minor) from the same day— Thursday, July 5, 2007. Some background from 2001:
"Are the finite simple groups, like the prime numbers, jewels strung on an as-yet invisible thread? And will this thread lead us out of the current labyrinthine proof to a radically new proof of the Classification Theorem?" (p. 345)
— Ronald Solomon, "A Brief History of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 2001), pp. 315-352
The major event— On July 5, 2007, Cambridge University Press published Robert T. Curtis's Symmetric Generation of Groups.*
Curtis's book does not purport to lead us out of Solomon's labyrinth, but its publication date may furnish a Jungian synchronistic clue to help in exiting another nightmare labyrinth— that of postmodernist nominalism.
The minor event— The posting of Their Name is Legion in this journal on July 5, 2007.
* This is the date given by Amazon.co.uk and by BookDepository.com. Other sources give a later July date, perhaps applicable to the book's publication in the U.S. rather than Britain.
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Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Uploading
Philosophy versus Stories —
The above uploading was done on December 10th, 2006.
For some context, see the Log24 posts for December 2006.
See also the German version of a nursery rhyme
that one commenter has called "morbid and horrifying"—
"Dein Vater sitzt auf der Schwelle:
Flieg in Himmel aus der Hölle."
The rhyme suggests characters in the novel The Quest for the 36
related to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire often recalled during
women's history month. It also suggests the oeuvre of Stephen King.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
– Ulysses
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Monday, March 2, 2009
Monday March 2, 2009
Joyce's Nightmare
continues
Today in History – March 2
|
|
From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:
"He brings out the mandala he found.
Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night…."
In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another… 
Christ and the Four Elements
This 1495 image is found in
Related mandalas:
For further details,
click on any of the three mandalas above. |
Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tuesday June 17, 2008
Nightmare Alley
"History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake."
— Ulysses
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
|
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society…. He purred a chuckle. "Love to. The Luogo Nero? "That's what the locals call it.
— Psychoshop, by |
In memory of
special effects wizard
Stan Winston,
who died Sunday at 62:
"The energetic Winston
was always looking
to the next project."
— Today's LA Times,
story by
Dennis McLellan
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Tuesday August 7, 2007
In memory of
Atle Selberg, mathematician,
dead at 90 on August 6, 2007
According to the
American Mathematical Society,
Selberg died, like André Weil, on
the Feast of the Metamorphosis.
Endgame
Metaphor for Morphean morphosis,
Dreams that wake, transform, and die,
Calm and lucid this psychosis,
Joyce's nightmare in Escher's eye.
— Steven H. Cullinane, Nov. 7, 1986
For further views of
the Amalfi coast, site of
the above Escher scene,
see the film "A Good Woman"
(made in 2004, released in 2006)
starring Scarlett Johansson–
Scene from "A Good Woman"
— and the following from
Collegiate Church of
St. Mary Magdalene,
Atrani, Amalfi Coast, Italy:
"An interior made exterior"
— Wallace Stevens
St. Mary Magdalene,
Atrani, Amalfi Coast, Italy:
"An interior made exterior"
— Wallace Stevens
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Monday, June 18, 2007
Monday June 18, 2007
Obituaries in the News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:13 a.m. ET
Norman Hackerman
“AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Norman Hackerman, a chemist … died Saturday [June 16] …. He was 95. … He taught chemistry … before joining the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II.”
The date of Hackerman’s death is celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday— the day on which, in 1904, the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses came to pass.
Scene from
“Behind the Lid” —
Photo by Richard Termine
“Behind the Lid” is an avant-garde production featuring scenes from the author’s life presented in the form of dreams.
Those who like such scenes may consult past Log24 entries. They will find, for instance, the following, commemorating a death which, like Hackerman’s, occurred on a Bloomsday:
Click on the picture for details.
“History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare
from which I am
trying to awake.”
— Ulysses
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Sunday, February 18, 2007
Sunday February 18, 2007
Further Adventures
in Harvard Iconology
in Harvard Iconology
The next novel starring
Robert Langdon, Harvard author
of "the renowned collegiate
texbook Religious Iconology"
is said to be titled
The Solomon Key.
Related material–
The Harvard Crimson online:
| Fishburne To Receive Honors at Cultural Rhythms Acclaimed actor and humanitarian chosen as the Harvard Foundation's Artist of the Year By DORIS A. HERNANDEZ Friday, February 16, 2007 9:37 PM Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Laurence Fishburne will take the stage later this month as the 2007 Artist of the Year during the 22nd annual Cultural Rhythms festival, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations announced Friday afternoon. |
Fishburne
as Morpheus
"Metaphor for Morphean morphosis,
Dreams that wake, transform, and die,
Calm and lucid this psychosis,
Joyce's nightmare in Escher's eye….
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock."
— Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986,
"Endgame"
More on metamorphosis–
Cat's Yarn
(Log24, June 20, 2006):
"The end is where
we start from."
plus.maths.org
and
Garfield 2003-06-24
See also:
Zen Koan
and
Blue Dream.
Update of 5:24 PM
Feb. 18, 2007:
A Xanga footprint from France
this afternoon (3:47 PM EST)
indicates that someone there
may be interested in the above
poem's "claves regni caelorum."
The visitor from France viewed
"Windmills" (Nov. 15, 2005).
Material related to that entry
may be found in various places
at Log24.com. See particularly
"Shine On, Hermann Weyl," and
entries for Women's History
Month last year that include
"Christ at the Lapin Agile."
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Sunday, July 30, 2006
Sunday July 30, 2006
History
From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press–
On this date (July 30):
“In 1864, during the Civil War, Union forces tried to take Petersburg, Va., by exploding a mine under Confederate defense lines; the attack failed.”
“A nightmare” — Ulysses
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
– Han Shan
See also July 3, 2005.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Thursday May 27, 2004
Ineluctable
On the poetry of Geoffrey Hill:
"… why read him? Because of the things he writes about—war and peace and sacrifice, and the search for meaning and the truths of the heart, and for that haunting sense that, in spite of war and terror and the indifferences that make up our daily hells, there really is some grander reality, some ineluctable presence we keep touching. There remains in Hill the daunting possibility that it may actually all cohere in the end, or at least enough of it to keep us searching for more.
There is a hard edge to Hill, a strong Calvinist streak in him, and an intelligence that reminds one of Milton….."
— Paul Mariani, review in America of Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon
"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
— James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter
"Time has been unfolded into space."
"Pattern and symmetry are closely related."
— James O. Coplien on Symmetry Breaking
"… as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, 'the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations'….
— Goldberg, S.L. 'Homer and the Nightmare of History.' Modern Critical Views: James Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38."
— from the Choate site of David M. Loeb
In summary:
 Joyce |
See also Time Fold.
(By the way, Jorn Barger seems
to have emerged from seclusion.)
Comments Off on Thursday May 27, 2004
Monday, April 19, 2004
Monday April 19, 2004
Cartesian Theatre
From aldaily.com today:
"If my mind is a tiny theatre I watch in my brain, then there is a tinier mind and theatre inside that mind to see it, and so on forever… more»"
This leads to the dream (or nightmare) of the Cartesian theatre, as pictured by Daniel Dennett.
From websurfing yesterday and today…
The tiny theatre of Ivor Grattan-Guinness:
The contempt for history of the Harvard mathematics department (see previous entry) suggests a phrase….
A search on "Harvard sneer" yields, as the first page found, a memorial to an expert practitioner of the Harvard sneer… Robert Harris Chapman, Professor of English Literature, playwright, theatrical consultant, and founding Director of the Loeb Drama Center from 1960 to 1980.
Continuing the Grattan-Guinness rainbow theme in a tinier theatre, we may picture Chapman's reaction to the current Irish Repertory Theatre production of Finian's Rainbow. Let us hope it is not a Harvard sneer.
In a yet tinier theatre, we may envision a mathematical version of Finian's Rainbow, with Og the leprechaun played by Andrew P. Ogg. Ogg would, of course, perform a musical version of his remarks on the Jugendtraum:
"Follow the fellow who follows a dream."
Melissa Errico
in Finian's Rainbow
"Give her a song like…. 'Look to the Rainbow,' and her gleaming soprano effortlessly flies it into the stratosphere where such numbers belong. This is the voice of enchantment…."
— Ben Brantley, today's NY Times
For related philosophical remarks on rainbows, infinite regress, and redheads, see
Comments Off on Monday April 19, 2004
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Saturday October 19, 2002
Mass Confusion
From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:
“It’s the birthday of [novelist] John le Carré, born David John Moore Cornwell, in Poole, England (1931)…. His father was a con artist who wanted his two sons to be lawyers because he thought it would come in handy. He sent them to boarding school, where they learned to speak and act like members of the British upper-class, but when they went home they knew they might have to bail him out of jail, or spend the holidays with a bunch of crooks. He learned German and became a spy, but said he ‘never did anything to alter the world order.'”
From The New York Times of Oct. 19, 2002:
“…victims of sexually abusive priests expressed despair and outrage yesterday at the Vatican’s refusal to endorse the American bishops’ zero tolerance policy….
‘This certainly sends the whole thing into wild confusion,’ said Thomas C. Fox, publisher of The National Catholic Reporter, an independent newsweekly that helped uncover the church’s sexual abuse problem nearly two decades ago. ‘It seems we haven’t moved anywhere in finding a resolution, and that makes it terribly, terribly painful. It’s like this nightmare simply won’t end.'”
Other classic Catholic quotations…
1. “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
2. “What is truth?”
3. “Writers often cry ‘Truth! Truth at all costs!’ Some are sincere. Others are hypocrites. They use the truth, distort it, exploit it, for an ulterior purpose. Let us consider the case of John Cornwell….” — Inside the Vatican
John Cornwell recently wrote a classic study of the Roman Catholic Church, Hitler’s Pope* (Viking Press, October 1999).
According to the Daily Catholic and to Inside the Vatican, Cornwell is the brother of of spy novelist John le Carré (born David Cornwell). An article in the Jerusalem Post, however, seems to say that the spy novelist had only one brother, whose name was in fact Tony, not John. A Sydney Morning Herald article confirms this version of the Cornwell family history. Finally, once one learns from the Sydney article that David Cornwell’s father’s name was Ronnie, a perfected Google search reveals a Literary Encyclopedia article that seems to demonstrate conclusively that the Roman Catholic sources cited above lied about John Cornwell’s family background. Of course, this may be wrong… Those who wish may investigate further.
* (I personally prefer Hitler’s own remarks on the Church’s “static pole,” but tastes differ.)
Comments Off on Saturday October 19, 2002
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Wednesday October 16, 2002
"History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake"
— James Joyce in Ulysses
"Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."
— Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester, to his friend Nicholas Ridley, former private chaplain to Henry VIII, on the occasion of their being burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic queen Bloody Mary Tudor on October 16, 1555